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Speaker 0 00:00:00 Northwestern student activists made national news this past weekend. After using the Northwestern versus Iowa football game, to call attention to a litany of social justice issues. Nine student protesters held up banners with statements, including calling for the board of trustees to meet with us now and to divest from death. The reference that environmental concerns is particularly striking as Northwestern just sent delegates through the United nations climate change conference, or cop 26, which is ongoing and currently being held in Glasgow. That's just one of Northwestern's many public commitments. This sustainability there's a clear disconnect here. As global climate change only continues to worsen. I spoke with fossil free Northwestern and environmental student activist group here on campus. I asked them where they see Northwestern not doing enough and how, and you could fill in that blank.
Speaker 1 00:00:46 Northwestern is demanding that the board of trustees divest Northwestern's endowment from fossil fuels and reinvest in the Evanston community and into life giving institutions.
Speaker 0 00:00:59 You're listening to Lucy London, a junior at Northwestern university.
Speaker 1 00:01:03 I've been involved with fossil free, um, her two and a half years. Now, since my freshman year,
Speaker 0 00:01:11 I asked Lucy what fossil free is calling on Northwestern university to do
Speaker 1 00:01:15 From the board of trustees. We want them to be transparent about their investments because they don't give us that information. And as students, we are stakeholders in this university and deserve to know what its money is being invested into. Um, and we also, we want them to have open communication with us. We want more meetings with them. We want them to be leaders, um, in climate action and climate justice. And that means putting their money into a viable into something that will support a livable and viable future for its students. And what it means for Northwestern is removing its investments from the top 100, um, coal oil and gas companies. Do we know specifically where Northwestern has these investments? So we don't know that the board of trustees has failed to be transparent about these investments that we have asked multiple times. Um, so as far as we know, as of three or four years ago, they had about $50 million invested in gas and coal. Um, that number probably has grown by now
Speaker 0 00:02:32 Transparency between the board and students was discussed at this Wednesday's fossil free Northwestern meeting. Listen, as a student speaks during the event
Speaker 2 00:02:41 And ties and university decision-making, um, we elaborated that in the discussion. Um, but I think that the main target of at the board of trustees, knowing that it used to be, um, democratically elected like teachers or potentially parents, but now it's like donors who aren't connected to fossil free and war profiteers. I've
Speaker 1 00:02:59 Got a little, no accountability, and that's not the policy. It's like, whatever that means, select them at the time
Speaker 0 00:03:05 In 2019 and fossil free submitted a divestment proposal to the advisory committee on investment responsibility, which mediates student communication with the board of trustees, the committee then recommended their divestment proposal to the,
Speaker 1 00:03:18 It took the board eight or nine months to get back to fossil free. And after the, the, in, during that nine months, um, the board, the board of trustees also released, um, uh, statements on investment responsibility or like guidelines on investment responsibility that they used to reject our proposal after we had already submitted it to them. So it really, the timeline makes no sense because they developed the, uh, the guidelines after we had submitted our proposal to them. So we had no way of, uh, tailoring it to those guidelines. Um, and then in February of 2020, they rejected,
Speaker 0 00:04:06 You might be wondering how the situation is playing out in other universities, Harvard university divested this September significant, both Ford's prestige and its $41.9 billion endowment, the largest in the country, Dartmouth college, Boston university, and the university of Minnesota all also divested in the past two months
Speaker 1 00:04:25 At this point, they better divest because they're looking really bad because so many other universities sometimes mastered in the last couple of months. So if Northwestern doesn't diverse, they're just trailing behind. They're already trailing behind regardless of whether or not they divest in the next couple of months, fossil free is still going to demand environmental justice, um, from this university. Um, and that of us kind of figuring out what that looks like after divestment. I think it's likely that the university will divest soon and we don't want that to end our campaign.
Speaker 0 00:05:01 This was also brought up during Wednesday's meeting by student who wished to remain anonymous.
Speaker 3 00:05:06 It is important to reinvest in that Vincent since we're here, but also the institutions that like are, we are benefiting from just by being here, right? Like are destroying the whole world. So I feel like specifying Evanston itself is like a bit limiting and we could just do multiple communities like that. We are like spiking here, contributes.
Speaker 1 00:05:30 Yeah. FASA three aims to support these groups, um, as best as we can, because we know that this movement is all intertwined and justice looks like all of these different things, not just climate justice. We want, well, climate justice is racial. Justice is, um, labor rights, um, is indigenous sovereignty and then back and there's so much work to be done
Speaker 0 00:06:00 For w and you are news I'm Emily's though.
